


giving up the ghost

by adreamaloud, daneorange (adreamaloud)



Category: Skins (UK) RPF
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-10-31
Updated: 2009-10-31
Packaged: 2017-10-18 18:21:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/191850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adreamaloud/pseuds/adreamaloud, https://archiveofourown.org/users/adreamaloud/pseuds/daneorange
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Later, in altogether different lives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	giving up the ghost

It’s cold that night Meg walks into the dimly lit bar, pleasantly surprised at how _soft_ the place actually is, inside; truth be told, she thought twice about entering, as the façade looked rather deceptively dark, but then, here she is, settling into a seat comfortably, ordering a margarita.

It’s one of those curious days that feel like they contain more hours than they’re supposed to, and, remembering the things still left undone on her list, Meg downs her drink as quickly as it comes.

 _It’s a great thing this place has music_ , she thinks absently to herself, fingertips running idly along the tip of her glass. The place is awash with soft, warm yellow lights, and there’s a pretty girl playing the piano up front. She’s singing, predictably, about a broken heart.

Meg sighs, circles the tip of her glass once, twice, before heading out for a fag; when she looks back on the stage, the girl has her eyes closed as she sings into her microphone, and Meg dismisses her as just another one of those generic blondes, the moment she is hit by a moment of familiarity.

*

Meg is on her way back in when the door opens; there’s a flash of blonde, a harried apology, and, in a bit, cursing. When Meg pulls her hand back, she finds her cigarette bent. “Shit,” she says, and it’s the first thing she says all night.

The girl looks up with an all-too-familiar scowl; they laugh as they catch each other’s eye.

“Fancy meeting you here, Meg,” the girl says, still gingerly holding her other hand. The immediate recognition startles Meg, at first, before altogether delighting her; not many people can do that, and be so confident. Lily doesn’t even blink.

Meg’s smile shifts immediately from amusement to worry, however, at the sight of Lily’s hand. “Are you all right?” she asks, in lieu of saying hello. Lily’s cropped her hair again, and Meg thinks it’s finer, this way. “I mean, sorry,” she says, flicking her cigarette onto the street, trying to zone in on the spot she had burned. When she gets back to herself, all she has left are small, easy words. “Lily. Wow. Christ.”

Lily’s laugh hasn’t changed. “Years, huh,” she just says, fishing out a fag herself with her non-injured hand. The burn is the size of a small coin; it sticks out as a red spot near a knuckle. “I won’t worry too much about it,” says Lily, following Meg’s eyes. She takes a drag off her cigarette before, “I mean, thank God it’s not on my palm, yeah?”

Meg looks at her quizzically before piecing it together. “You play here?”

“Thursday nights,” says Lily, blowing to the side. “You never drink too often on a weeknight, do you?” she asks, winking after, and Meg finds herself staring at the heavy strokes around Lily’s eyes. _This makeup is doing nothing to bring them out_ , she finds herself thinking. “Do you, Meg?”

Jolted, Meg just says, “Just this once.” And then, “I mean, around here. Awful day at work.”

Lily shakes her head, smirking, a hand on Meg’s arm. “Come on back in with me,” she says, grip tightening as she tugs. “You can tell me all about it,” she pauses by the doorway as she takes a final drag from her cigarette before throwing it out on the gutter, “Play catch up. What did I miss?”

Meg blinks, scrambling for something to say. She comes up with a list of things that have gone down in between and it’s entirely too long despite being incomplete. She feels a twinge right in the middle of her chest at the words, “years ago.”

Inside, it’s darker than Meg remembers, and under the little light, she catches Lily’s smile as she walks them over to an empty table in the corner. On the stage, a guitarist has taken over the task of filling the air with something other than silence.

Lily goes ahead and orders vodka for the both of them, and for a while, they settle for not saying anything.

As Lily finishes her drink, Meg asks, “How come we never got to hear you play before?”

Lily pauses with the edge of her glass still on her lips as she contemplates a response. “I haven’t exactly been playing all my life,” she just says after, putting her glass down on the table between them. “The opportunity just happened to present itself.”

“Ah,” says Meg, sipping from her drink gingerly; it’s been quite a while since she’s had vodka, as it’s something she likes to think she’d already outgrown. It goes down as a hot liquid line down her throat.

“You’re flushed,” Lily laughs, her voice dark and rough, like she’s been awake for too long. “What have you been up to?”

Meg explains the fluid nature of her work with matching hand gestures, and the whole gist of it – that she’s basically into multitasking everywhere – comes off exactly as intended: messy and confusing and complicated.

Lily shrugs, as if unimpressed. “What I wonder about mostly,” she says, leaning in; she’s wearing a crisp white blouse that has far too many buttons undone, that Meg has to consciously stop her eyes from straying. “Is how you manage to stay sober, granted the stress level.”

“I don’t,” Meg says almost immediately, proof that the vodka is working like magic, as always. “It’s just, well, just never here.”

Lily sits back, smirking as she toys with her necklace. “Is that right?” And then, “Have another one, then? On me, of course.” Meg nearly says no, thank you, but then Lily just goes ahead and says, “Christ, how long has it been?”

There’s a heavy sort of nostalgia in Lily’s look when Meg catches it, and Meg almost says something about Kat; instead, she just says, “Longer than it actually is.”

*

They part that night with an exchange of cards. Meg looks curiously at the embossed L’s of Lily’s name, touches them gingerly with the pad of a fingertip.

“You should come over, more often,” Lily says, tugging at her bonnet. They’re out on the street, fiddling with cigarettes with their non-card-holding hands. It’s quiet where they’re standing under the barely there streetlight, already dim perhaps from dust. “I meant, to the show. Thursday nights, yeah?”

Meg draws from her cigarette, still not taking her eyes off the card. “Yeah,” she says, pretending to be distracted. “Maybe some other time.”

“Like next week,” Lily laughs. Meg recognizes how it’s meant to be light, like a joke, but it comes off as terribly lonely; when Meg looks up from the card, she catches Lily’s eyes and sees it there, as well.

Meg wants to say yes, but all she comes up with is, “Let’s see.” They exchange awkward hugs, the way people who haven’t seen each other in a long time do, and at the end of it, Lily even turns her head and plants a kiss on Meg’s cheek, her lips slow to part with Meg’s skin.

Meg wonders briefly if this is warranted at all, or if Lily is only mistaken or drunk or both.

“See you then, yeah?” says Lily, after, though her eyes don’t meet Meg’s anymore as she turns around and walks the other way, disappearing around a corner, hands in the pockets of her coat, that ridiculous bonnet on her head.

*

Meg fiddles with her phone on the way home; checks her watch and thinks about calling Kat. Surely it must be already morning wherever Kat is; maybe she’d open with, “You’ll never guess who I ran into this evening,” and Kat would yawn on the other end, before fully realizing what Meg has just said.

Meg sighs, shakes her head as she closes her phone; wishes they are still the sort of siblings who stayed in touch.

*

Two Thursday nights later, Meg finds herself walking into the same joint again at around the same time. She sits in the same table in the corner, drinking her margarita idly while listening to Lily sing.

Meg finds herself thinking about how pleasant she actually _sounds_ , like soft fleece against skin after a thoroughly long day. She smiles absently as the song ends, at how Lily’s voice seems to wrap around the edge of it, as if she were tucking it into bed with a velvet blanket.

She’s still smiling when Lily walks on over, the sound of a chair being dragged across the floor slowly jolting her. “You liked that,” Lily says, and when Meg looks up, Lily has on that unmistakable Naomi-smile-smirk she’s perfected in the span of two seasons.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Meg says, though not unkindly; she’s smirking in kind, but not at all like the smile-smirks she had to do as Katie, once upon a time. There’s a decidedly warm feeling that spreads all over her chest as Lily slides into the seat across her, and Meg feels herself smile wider.

“A good day then?” asks Lily, off the look on Meg’s face; something that Meg feels somewhat pressured to rein in, a little. Lily leans in closer, looking at her as if she’s expecting Meg to blush, or something. “And since when have you been off vodka as first drink of choice?” she asks, as her eyes fall to the drink inside Meg’s hand.

Meg takes another sip before, “Quite a while, actually.” Her eyes fall on a spot on the back of Lily’s hand; it’s the same one Meg had burned a couple of weeks ago. “Sure you don’t need to cover that up?” asks Meg, the smile on her face fading as she shifts to something closer to worry.

The waiter interrupts with Lily’s drink; she takes a sip before, “Bandages only get in the way.” She pauses slightly to look Meg in the eye, and Meg shifts in her seat, as if that’s the best way to respond to the gesture.

“I meant piano playing, of course,” adds Lily, mistaking the look on Meg’s face for something else entirely. “I’d have difficulty moving my hands. And besides,” she shrugs, holding up the injured hand in front of her face to study it from a better-lit angle, “It’s awfully small, should be gone quickly without too much fuss.”

Meg shrugs in kind, sinking back into her seat. “If you say so,” she just says. She’s out of drinks, so she motions to the waiter with a raised hand; when she glances back over at Lily, Lily’s still staring at her, and it charges the air around them with something else entirely.

“You never really answered my question,” says Lily, her eyes steady, the blue in them still the most piercing Meg’s ever encountered, even after all this time. “’Quite a while’ means since when? Since we last saw each other at that party?”

“Kaya’s fucking boat yeah?” Meg finds herself smiling absently at the thought of it, a bunch of kids barely twenty years old trying to keep themselves from falling off a fucking yacht. “I’ve never ingested as much alcohol since, truth be told.”

Lily’s laughing lightly as she reaches for her drink, brushes against Meg’s hand on the table as she does ; Meg holds her breath, and a part of her starts wishing she isn’t in this place anymore, where everything Lily does still feels this way.

Lily must have noticed the change in Meg’s face as she asks, “You okay?”

Meg wants to say, _Sure_ ; wants to say, _Of course, I don’t remember a thing about that last time we were drunk together._ Instead, she shakes it out, straightens her shoulder a little. “Yeah, I’m fine,” she says, and just then the waiter comes by with her drink in his hand, and finally she manages a smile, again. “That was some crazy shit right there, that boat,” she just says.

“The shit that came after was crazier, though,” Lily says, tone shifting slightly toward somber. She downs her drink and Meg drinks up in kind, as if to express a kind of agreement.

 _After – Kat moving away. After – never seeing Lily again, until now._

 _After_ , truth be told, sucked in ways Meg still does not have words for. When the vodka hits the back of her throat – it’s mostly to appease Lily, a shout-out to this time called before – there’s that sort of sting again as her mouth is filled with _that taste_ again.

She can’t help how the memory feels like whenever it hits her – like a fresh cigarette burn that stings far more painfully than its size lets you in on. She winces as she brings the glass down, wiping at the corner of her mouth with the pad of her thumb.

When she opens her eyes, Lily is still looking at her, lips parted as she breathes in, a soft, slow hiss; Meg tries not to think about how this was what got her into trouble, in the first place.

*

“So do you remember?” asks Lily, four rounds of vodka later. “I mean, any of it?”

Younger, Meg would have said, _Yes_ , and it wouldn’t have meant anything other than that; it wouldn’t have had to. These days, though, that would necessarily mean an additional, _Yes, and that means I know why, as for everything else._ Far too grown up to not own up. Oh the things the years in between have done, she thinks. Sometimes, she likes to think she liked herself better when she wasn’t taking responsibility for everything all at once.

On the table, Lily’s playing with her glass, already a bit tipsy, if Meg goes by the smile Lily’s wearing; it’s something she knows well, from before. It’s the same smile she has on before kissing anyone, just because it can be done. Lily’s always been fairly secure about what’s going on in her head that none of it seems to matter more than it should, in the end; or at least, that’s as much as Lily lets in on, any given day.

Lily says, “It’s okay to say yes, Meg,” straightening her glass, its bottom now flat against the surface, leftover ice clinking against each other, inside. “It’s a long time ago.”

Sighing, Meg contemplates what to say to that. After a while, she comes up with, “You could have easily said, _Wrong twin_.” She remembers how it was dusk then, when Lily kissed her against the railing of the yacht, the cold wrapping around them both.

“Only it wasn’t,” is all Lily says, and Meg opens her eyes, surprised that she closed them, even, in the first place. Suddenly, she smells the sea; sees Kat, all over again, the red of her hair as she turned around and walked away.

Meg pushes herself off her seat, gets to her feet unsteadily. “Is this all you have to say?” she asks, licking her lips. Inside, there’s something sharp poking painfully in her stomach and she feels like throwing up. “Years, yeah?”

Lily doesn’t say anything, her lips pressed together thinly. Meg gives herself a couple of seconds before making her way to the rest room, pushing against the first stall door and leaning over.

In a bit, she hears the rest room door open; soon enough, there’s a hand around her wrist, another hand that’s holding her hair out of the way. “Let me,” says Lily, and at the firmness of her hold, Meg lets go, slowly. Lily’s palm is cold against her back, and suddenly, Meg is heaving and tossing and so near to blacking out.

*

When she comes to later that night, Lily’s reading next to her in an unfamiliar couch; she has glasses on that she’s barely familiar, and Meg tries to be quiet as she opens her eyes, squinting against the light of a nearby lamp. She shifts slightly to the side, hoping Lily doesn’t notice.

“Water?” offers Lily, and immediately, Meg’s hopes of being stealthy are dashed. She sits up, groans a little at the feel of this heavy throbbing inside her head, pushes against her temples with two fingers. “Headache?”

Meg nods. “I may have overshot my limit,” she says, and Lily smiles softly as she puts the book away and stands, walking into a dark hallway off the side. Meg presumes she’s in Lily’s apartment and that she’s heading toward the kitchen; in a while, there’s a soft glow that’s unmistakably from the inside of a refrigerator. It illuminates Lily in a way that brings Meg back to sharing a flat and midnight snacks and –

When Lily comes back out, she has a glass of water in one hand and ibuprofen in the other, both outstretched. Meg shifts her eyes from Lily’s hands to her face; she looks so clean, with all the makeup and the grime of the day washed off, and Meg’s head is filled with the singular thought of touching her.

“Should do something with the pain,” Lily just says, moving her ibuprofen-wielding hand forward slightly. “Unless of course you deal with your hangover now in a way I’m no longer familiar with.”

Meg takes the pill as prodded, breathes in as she chases it with water; tries to disregard Lily’s attempt at reminding her of how familiar they once have been.“How did I get here?”

“Same way as the piano,” Lily replies smoothly, settling back into the couch beside Meg, smiling as if she’s won a wit contest.

Meg spots the baby grand piano by the corner, wonders how she’s managed to miss it all this time, before giving in with a smile of her own. “Thanks for the rather vivid comparison,” she just says, and for a moment, amidst the brief round of laughter they share, they are fine. “But seriously. Lily.”

Lily looks at her before walking over to sit in front of the piano, moving to play it. She cracks her knuckles before she starts something, a tune that Meg’s not familiar with.

“Is this how you evade questions now, Loveless?” Meg asks, though she’s laughing, a little; like something has finally lifted, however slightly. Lily looks back over her shoulder, smiles back as she catches Meg’s eyes; something in Meg’s head goes, _Damn it, here she goes again,_ and she moves to smooth the fabric above her chest with a hand, as if to quiet something down, though the gesture’s still only half conscious.

“Come over, sit right here,” Lily’s saying, moving to the side and patting the space beside her with a hand, while the other hand keeps playing a slightly upbeat tune. When Meg doesn’t move, Lily stops playing, shifts around and looks at her with a raised brow, a slightly wicked smile that tells Meg immediately, just how she’s absolutely _done for_. “Ask me from here.”

Meg rolls her eyes, trying to disguise how she’d just swallowed rather heavily. “You’d wake your neighbors,” she says softly as she walks over, three steps max, ultimately surprised that the space she settles into beside Lily is just _right_.

“We’ll do it softly, then,” Lily says, taking Meg by the wrist and propping her hand above the keys; Meg, expectedly, freezes at the contact, stilling her hand, far too afraid to make a sound. “It doesn’t bite,” Lily adds, noticing.

“I don’t play,” says Meg, lowering her hand to her lap. “Go ahead; I’d love to watch.”

“Sure you don’t want me to go all Heart and Soul on you?” asks Lily, grinning, and Meg shakes her head, biting her lip. Just like that it all feels like fucking good old times all over again, and Meg leans in closer for a small shove as Lily starts something familiar, finally.

“Fuck you, Lily,” she just says, grinning herself, putting a finger over C. Lily winks at her. They don’t stop laughing until morning.

*

Lily’s still playing by daybreak; beside her, Meg stretches, yawning. “I totally have work tomorrow,” she just says. “Or, should be, in a few hours.”

Lily wraps the song up, caps it with a couple of high notes. “Sorry to have kept you up this long,” she says, hand settling on Meg’s thigh. “Though this night sure was something for the books, yeah?”

“Totally,” Meg grins, sleepily. In the span of a few hours, they’ve managed to talk about everything – from embarrassing reminiscences to Kaya’s latest project – while managing to skirt around the very things that have kept Meg on her toes all night. “Whatever do you do on days that are not Thursday?”

“Model, occasionally,” says Lily. “A few plays.”

Meg just says, “Ah,” before noticing, finally, how Lily’s hand on her thigh is growing warm. Coming to her senses, Meg moves away, stands up and says, “Anyway, I should get going,” as she runs a nervous hand through her hair, tries to block out how Lily had said this shade is better on her, earlier.

On the piano, Lily begins playing idly, again. “Fuck work,” she says, three notes after. “You should call in sick. Your headache’s going to be horrible later in the day, anyway.”

Meg sinks back into the couch, still yawning. “You’re totally bad for me, Loveless,” she just says, rubbing her eyes. “Do you know that?”

“Always have been,” says Lily, pushing herself off the piano finally and joining Meg. “But seriously. Stay.”

Meg looks at her, watches as her face rearranges itself into something looking a bit more serious, until Lily’s looking at her levelly, like it’s not nearly 5 in the morning and she hasn’t just suggested that Meg skip work altogether. “You never answered that question,” Meg remembers.

“Which one?”

“How did I get here?”

Lily laughs. “I said, like the piano.”

“You know that’s not what I meant.”

Lily leans in to kiss her; it’s soft and lazy, and off the back of the couch, Lily’s finger is stroking her shoulder, her arm. It takes a while for Meg to get off the initial shock of it, but when she does, she relents and returns it anyway, trying to remind herself to breathe; that this is okay, because the thing that used to not make this okay is not here anymore. Now far away.

“I still wonder how it would have been, had it been you, right from the very start,” says Lily when they part, blinking and licking her lips. It’s the most they say about anything that remotely refers to Kat, that night.

“Far too long ago for regrets,” Meg just says.

*

They spend most of the afternoon after on a worn couch on the rooftop of Lily’s building, smoking and staring at the buildings and the horizon ahead.

“So,” Lily breathes in, flicking the ash off the tip of her cigarette. “Any news about your sister, then?”

Meg shakes her head. “We don’t talk much, these days.”

“Jesus,” says Lily, rubbing at her forehead. “After all these years?”

“Somewhere along the way, Kat must have learned how not to let go of a few things,” says Meg. She reaches over for Lily’s pack and slides out another fag. “I let it be, you know? We’re not the children we were, anymore.”

“I’m sorry,” Lily says, flicking a lighter open at the tip of Meg’s cigarette. “Totally my fault, wasn’t that.”

“Not as much as it was mine.” Meg sucks on the cigarette once, twice before exhaling, right after she is assured it’s already alive. Looking up, she squints against the sunlight, trying to make out shapes among the clouds. “Where did it go wrong? I mean, the two of you,” she asks, after a while.

“We were better off as friends,” Lily just says, looking the other way.

“And we’re not?” Off to the right, Meg spots something that looks like a fire-breathing turtle; the image makes her snicker to herself.

Lily shifts on the sofa, inching closer. “What kind of a question is that?”

“A perfectly valid one?”

Lily laughs, swatting Meg’s thigh playfully. “Smart-ass,” she says, before, “Really, you have to ask this question? What do you think?”

“But we are good as friends, aren’t we?”

“Well, yes,” says Lily. “Though I do like it better when I could kiss you.”

Meg rolls her eyes, blushing. “You’ve always liked kissing girls who are your friends.”

“I don’t do that anymore.” When Meg turns her head to look, Lily’s biting the corner of her lip. “You understand?” she asks, catching Meg’s eye. “People grow up, yeah?”

 _People grow up, yeah?_ In only so many words, it dawns on Meg, just how the years between have changed so much.

*

After dinner, Lily hands her a mug of yogurt. “You still into that diet shit you used to be on?” she asks, smirking. “I remember opening the fridge once, and…”

“Shut it, Loveless,” says Meg, grabbing the mug with one hand, the proffered spoon with the other. “Obviously, I may have lost track of the pounds, somewhere,” she adds, tugging at the hem of her top self-consciously.

Lily looks at her, spoon in her mouth. “Actually, you’re still well fit,” she says, giving Meg a once-over that ultimately makes her blush.

“Jesus, Lily,” Meg says, dropping her head and blushing even deeper. She focuses on her yogurt instead, jabs at it with her spoon, mindlessly. “Whatever happened to all those blokes I heard you were dating?”

“Better off as friends?” Lily shrugs, smiling.

When Meg looks up, smiling in kind, she sees a stray bit of yogurt at the corner of Lily’s lips. “Here,” she says, reaching over, brushing away the mess with the side of her thumb. “Got a bit there, yeah.” Lily laughs a little, somewhat surprised; her cheeks are flushed with a sort of embarrassment that she copes with by comically sticking her tongue out, catching Meg’s finger in the process.

“Such a child,” Meg admonishes, handing her a napkin. And then, “Seems like you’re better off as friends with _everybody_.”

Lily takes a spoonful before, “Well, obviously _not_ everybody…”

“Lily.”

“What?” asks Lily, laughing still, and Meg’s only shaking her head and looking into her mug, by now nearly empty. “I don’t know about you, Prescott, but you can just be fucking cute sometimes, and—”

“Oh god, what are we even doing?” asks Meg, attempting something serious, something definite, something adult – for once. Hopefully, something that would produce the solid sort of answer that she’s been looking for since she started asking the previous night.

Lily laughs it all out of her system; lets it die down first. “Something we never had time for, before,” she just says, laying her hand over Meg’s on the backrest, lightly.

*

Lily’s in the middle of a spirited improv, fingers gliding over keys so nimbly, when the impulse attacks; the speed, the energy of the effort has made Meg dizzy, somewhat, and now she’s reaching over and grabbing Lily, pulling her in as the disconnect between the gestures and the sounds grows wider. Lily manages to play on, albeit slower, three, four, five notes, before giving it up altogether, fingers coming down in a disjointed chord, all at once.

“Meg,” Lily manages, in the gaps between that have somehow allowed for breaths, “Slow down, slow down…”

Against Lily’s lips, Meg is shaking her head, saying something halfway between “No” and “Now.”

Meg senses a sudden shift as Lily grips her by the waist firmly, feels a dull pain just below her hip as she hits something; she’s severely out of it that she has to open her eyes to realize that they’re standing, that Lily’s backing her against the piano.

Meg reaches for something to hold onto, grips a random set of keys; the low sound of them, a madman’s tantrum, fills the room and wraps them inside a heavy buzz. Somewhere, Lily’s hand is undoing a zipper as she laughs briefly against Meg’s neck, her breath warm. “Fuck, don’t break it,” she says, though Meg is uncertain if Lily means the piano or the moment.

Putting a hand under her, Lily lifts Meg slightly, and the keys are replaced with something solid and smooth as the piano keys are covered with a swift, wooden clapping sound.

Lily lifts her head a moment, licks her lips as she catches Meg’s eye; their chests are heaving, and the room is quiet, save for the soft hissing of breaths. “Now,” Lily says, letting a smile creep in, lifting a corner of her lips. “Where were we?”

Meg wraps a leg around Lily, propping it up on the chair behind her, catching her lower lip between her teeth; she shrugs as she says, “Just here.”

*

Meg tries leaving the morning after, only to wake Lily with the sound of rustling denim, despite efforts at being stealthy; she tries looking away just as Lily turns over, stretching lazily as she pushes herself up to sit on the bed, wrapping the sheets around herself.

“Sorry,” says Meg, dropping her gaze upon the button she’s fiddling with. “Didn’t mean to wake you, but I’ve been putting off things for so long, and…”

Lily smiles lazily, smoothing her hair. “’S’alright,” she says, tucking the edge of the sheet to secure it as she stands, the longish end of it sweeping the floor, after. “Breakfast?”

Meg zips her jeans up before pausing to look at Lily, tries to resist that inviting look she has on that’s making the retreat back into bed absolutely attractive; she’s completely riveted that she forgets she’s still holding her shirt in one hand, and notices only when she feels the sunlight burning at her bare back. She turns her head to face the window, squinting against what must be already the mid-morning light before shrugging her shirt on.

“I totally liked the previous view better,” says Lily, smirking.

Meg laughs, blushing, taking her hair out from under her collar. “Perv,” she says, sticking her tongue out for good measure, to which Lily laughs herself, a low throaty sound that Meg would love to wake up to, again and again.

With a hand running through the mess of her hair, Lily walks out of the bedroom; Meg follows her into the kitchen, the edge of the sheet Lily had wrapped around herself still trailing after her on the floor. Lily puts the kettle on, opens a couple of drawers to produce things to make breakfast with.

“I shouldn’t stay,” Meg begins, shoving her hands into her pockets, yet inside, her heart’s feeling ridiculously warmed.

Lily doesn’t even turn around. “Let me do this for you.” After a pause, she adds, “Please.”

Meg breathes in, closes her eyes as she braces herself with both hands against the kitchen counter, trying to focus on the sound of mugs being placed on the tiled counter, of metal spoons clinking against china, of water coming to a boil – anything other than this thrumming that’s steadily getting fast; faster, like it’s about to break a bone.

When Meg opens her eyes, it’s to Lily handing her a mug as the smell of coffee fills the room. “Caffeine should be good for you,” she says; Meg doesn’t look at her because she has a way of making her feel things that Meg may or may not be ready for, altogether. Instead, Meg looks at the shaft of sun coming in from the window, hitting Lily’s toes as they peek from under the sheets.

Lily says, “It doesn’t have to be anything we don’t want it to be.”

Meg looks up from the rim of her mug before sipping. “Is that all right?” she asks, biting her lip. “Is it okay to step back, breathe a little?”

Lily smiles. “We can do whatever we want,” she says softly, sipping herself. “We’ve earned it, having gotten this far.”

Breathing in, Meg nods, says nothing as she finishes her mug of coffee, slowly. Leaning against Lily’s kitchen counter, saying nothing throughout the morning, doing little else other than take her coffee in the most leisurely way possible – Meg realizes how it can be nice, when some things are just _easy_.

*

It’s two weeks later when Meg sees her again; she’s quite unsure at first if it were really her behind the piano, until the moment that Lily spots her in the same corner as before and winks at her.

After the set, Lily slides into the space next to Meg. “Long time,” she greets, smiling as if to say, _I haven’t smiled like this in a while._

Meg blinks, reaching to touch Lily’s hair; she’s dyed it a violent shade of pink. “At first I wasn’t sure…” she begins, snickering a little. “But it looks good on you.”

“You think?” asks Lily, suddenly self-conscious.

Meg looks harder, remembering something; she pauses as she swallows. “Sorry,” she says, noting the raised brow Lily gives her upon noticing the shift in her mood. “It’s just – it’s the exact same shade Kat had once.”

Lily nods. “Ah,” she says, a strained smile forming at first, before she ultimately relaxes altogether, after a while. “What’s up with her, yeah? You heard from her?”

“Oh you know,” Meg shrugs, eyes straying. She motions to the waiter for her order. “She’s coming back to London to visit briefly, maybe in a couple of weeks?” she says, not looking at Lily. Somewhere, she knows it hardly matters to Lily anymore, but somewhere else, she’s feeling a certain sting about not having come before; about having to come _after_.

“Really?” says Lily, tone only slightly amused.

“Yeah, really,” says Meg. The waiter comes along and she orders vodka. Lily eyes her curiously but says nothing, just orders her drink in kind. “You should get together when she’s here. She’d like that.”

It takes a moment before Lily says, “Let’s see,” sliding her hand across the table to place it on top of Meg’s. “Apart from that, how are you, though?”

And just like that, Lily turns all of it around, into something that Meg feels quite safe in; a place where Meg feels she _fits_. “How am I?” she repeats, smiling as she looks at the sight of their joined hands.

“Yes, you,” Lily says. Absently, her thumb starts stroking the back of Meg’s hand, and Meg feels the beginning of butterflies. “I missed you.”

Meg breathes in; the butterflies have gone berserk, and they are ticklish and insane. “Me too,” she just says, smile growing wide at the flutter of things inside.

When their drinks arrive, Lily raises her glass to a toast. “To giving up ghosts.”

Meg clinks her glass against Lily’s and drinks up, in kind. “To living past hauntings,” she says back.

*

They spend the rest of the night mostly quiet, only looking at each other and saying nothing, and the way the lights hit the pink of Lily’s hair is just about right; the moment fills Meg with the singular thought of how everything is just perfect, like a concerto with a well-practiced virtuoso at its helm, hitting all the right keys.#  


**Author's Note:**

> skins rpf, lily/meg, R. years later, in altogether different lives.


End file.
